I listened to this every night in the summer after 9th grade. I liked the image of the scruffy romantic returning to an old lover. All songs on the album by Jimmy Webb.
Not that I had any old lovers myself, nor even a new one, unless we are counting* church camp or Doug Manter's birthday party in his basement. But if I got a girlfriend, and I lost her, but I still loved her, and she signaled she wanted me to return, I would try and be just like Richard Harris.
* A friend asked what I meant when I referred to a girl we had both known as a "semi-girlfirend" and I explained about that particular party as my evidence. "Well if that's gonna be the standard, I've got a lot more ex-boyfriends than I thought I did."
Dividing the children of the NSFH
into four groups - those with no family disruption, those who lost a parent to
death, those whose parents divorced, and those born to never-married mothers -
we find significant differences in educational outcomes. Those whose mothers
divorced or never married clearly suffer the most negative effects. Adjusting
for the factors that predate father absence and are known to influence school
failure, we find that children in these two categories are several times more
likely to drop out of school than their peers with intact families. The dropout
risk is 37 percent for those with never-married mothers and 31 percent for
those with divorced parents, in contrast with the 13 percent risk of those from
families with no disruption. Significantly, the risk for children who lost a
parent to death is 15 percent, virtually the same as that for children from
intact homes. Clearly, children of a widowed mother enjoy economic and other
advantages over their peers from households headed by divorced or never-married
parents.
Or? Or? What could be another possibility why the children of widowed mothers might do as well as the children of intact homes? Seeing that it is not likely that widowed mothers enjoy that much economic advantage (life insurance, I suppose) and the other advantages are...what, exactly, compared to the divorced and never married?
Maybe it's not what I suspect. But shouldn't the possibility of (forbidden answer) be considered rather than assumed to not be in operation?
Update: Donna B thinks I'm being too cute by not mentioning my guess and she is probably right. Genetic differences between the fathers who died and the fathers who were still alive but not present (and the women they married) were not mentioned as even a possibility for the different outcomes. Study after study, what is measured is the environment, even when genetics are a distinct possibility.
Those of us who are Aspies will sometimes take your words over-literally. If you are just making small talk I can usually tell that you aren't really bringing a topic up for conversation, but sometimes...sometimes I think 'Well you brought it up." Phatic expressions I usually identify correctly. Though when someone asks "How are you?" I usually give a short anser that gives real information: "Tired," or "Pretty good, really." The closer a comment is to being unusual, or rising about mere small talk, the more likely I am to go with it. If take it 10% out of range of small talk, I might experimentally take it 30% out with my next comment. Last year in Rhode Island a guy told me "Great shirt!" but after I had explained about getting it from my Filipina DIL said a little ruefully "I just said it was a great shirt. I didn't ask for its history." Ouch.
I usually read the room well enough to tell if I have badly missed pretty quickly and draw it to a close, thinking Okay, you didn't really want to talk about your sister, then. Email, and especially texting either doesn't yet have good enough signals for sorting out the tough ones, or I just don't know them well enough. I have had people say they hadn't really asked for my opinion on something, but I think back and wonder "Well, why did you give me yours, then?" A lot of people expect to just be able to make pronouncements and never have to answer for them. Well, perhaps they are right. It may be one of the conversational subtleties that my autistic brain just doesn't get right.
It's seldom a big deal. I've watched people do far worse, and had people do far worse to me. But I am clearly on the side of "If you didn't want to talk about it, why did you bring it up?"
1 Corinthians 4:5 The
moral of this is that we should make no hasty or premature judgments.
When the Lord comes he will bring into the light of day all that at
present is hidden in darkness, and he will expose the secret motives of
men’s hearts. Then shall God himself give each man his share of praise. J. B. Phillips New Testament.
We think we know, but we do not. It is certainly true that sometimes we must judge, at least enough to decide. Yet the Scripture teaches so often that we should wait, reserve judgement, slow down that I have to think we are far more likely to err in that direction.
I saw a FB meme today to the effect that "I don't want AI to do my art and writing for me so that I can do laundry and dishes; I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I have more time to do art and writing." I am not forwarding the actual meme for a couple of reasons, but mostly because they will certainly believe that I agree with the sentiment, and I don't want to encourage that.
The fear does arise that DALL-E is going to put real artists out of business, and Chat-GPT bids fair to do the same for writers. I have some sympathy, as Google put me out of business overnight decades ago. There is a theory that we are not so much self-interested but tribally-interested in our political and cultural sympathies. We want presidents who look like they are going to help Our People get more and better jobs. When I wrote much over a decade ago about the Arts & Humanities and other American tribes I took note of this. We frame things in terms that we regard as clearly practical and better-for-the-country or even moral and better-for-the-whole-culture, but often it is really just jobs for the children of our friends, were we to be stern with ourselves. The other American tribes do the same thing, BTW. It just didn't come up here.
So the statement, though many of us here will feel some sympathy for it, is almost completely backwards. First, we already live in that world where a technology now does our dishes and laundry for us.
What we did in response to this is develop a culture in which we had more that two sets of clothes and had kitchensful of new appliances and varieties of dishes and tableware that used to be the province of only the rich. More rooms. Foods, and new ones, year-round. Landscaping, entertainment tech, communications of all sorts. When it got easier we just increased our desire for it and rapidly took it for granted. When technology graduated into doing more housework, we just went 10x on the amount of housework needed.
We are already in the world where you get to do lots of art and writing, Jasper (and I know that the poster is retired or near-retired, BTW. Tell your great-grandfather about retirement.)
Next, I think dishes and laundry are nearly always necessary and thus a bit noble. Noble activities have the potential for being ennobling. Maybe not always fun. Much as I like writing and music, I don't have complete confidence those have been ennobling for me. In fact, they may be a net loss in terms of my character. If so for me, likely for all the people who checked like or love on the post also.
It sounds a bit snobbish, actually, because if you take this idea of what you want AI to do seriously, you will automatically, without noticing it, regard your hobby scribbling as more elevated than the actual livelihoods of millions of people in the world. "We didn't want to become obsolete ourselves. But we are okay with other people becoming obsolete, so long as they are working at low-status jobs already."
The more I look at this, the uglier it gets. I'm done now.
Every time I have heard his extreme claim that he has heard only Christians admit to pride I think this must not be so. (Notice he does not come anywhere near claiming that all or even most Christians admit to pride.) I set myself the task of thinking through those I know, yet never come up with one. WRT most other sins, I know non-Christians who are as aware and even penitent as any Christian, but Lewis may be correct. I never seem to come up with examples of those who perceive that pride is their downfall. I have heard some men cop to the extreme of it, such as admitting they can be cocky at times. I have heard that the concept was common in the Hasidic communities.
His words here are to me like a searchlight after one's eyes have adjusted to the dark: not merely embarrassing, but painful. As often happens with Lewis, there are sentences I could swear were not there the last time I read the book that God has sneakily inserted this very week in response to my failings.
I am in discussion with engineerlite whether I will be teaching this in the fall. I originally declined, but now wonder whether the Hound of Heaven is pursuing me. Nice doggie.
As I was ascending, and later descending, a spiral staircase in a castle I reflected first on how steep and narrow they often were. Only on the outer side is there much room for a foot. The railings are not always that helpful, the treads sometimes slant downward, the natural light is bad. It would be tough to navigate these at speed in an emergency. Especially, I thought, they would be tough on a 70-year-old man. What with battle wounds and poor medical care, gaits and stabilising would be impaired, and this would not improve with age. Why, ...
Oh. Right. They didn't have many 70-year old men. Nothing in a castle was designed with them in mind.
"Our results are a little more nuanced than ‘autistic people are just
more Neanderthal.’ We’ve found that autistic people, on average, have
more rare Neanderthal variants, not that they have more Neanderthal DNA
in general."
Interesting stuff. When a species or subgroup is completely outcompeted by another with which it has interbred, it is often the case that the few genes they leave behind in the population confer some advantage, such as Tibetan high-altitude genes. Though not always. Susceptibility to various diseases can also occur in this way.
Sometimes I have despair at the government even when some branch or agency does the right thing. The Supreme Court wants Congress to be the ones who make gun law, not less-accountable and less-constitutional agencies. Well, great. We've been hearing for years that it should be congress and not any of the last 14* presidents, more than my lifetime, to (sorta, kinda, I-didn't-really but now we're here and we have to pay 10x more than we promised for it) declare war.
Congress would rather not do that job. Someone will surely be upset at any decision and who knows if that will ruin A) Your chances of being a playah in your party or worse B) hurt your chances for re-election. So they do other jobs instead, that make people upset enough to grumble but not riot - or not riot too hard, anyway.
Sometimes the agency in question is nefarious, power-seeking, conscienceless. Sometimes they just have a job to do and in the absence of congress doing its job, they make up rules and say "All you guys have to wear green, and the girls will wear yellow. And we'll decide where the boundary is, dammit."
Who to blame? All of us, as usual. It's too much trouble for the citizenry so we just go about our business and hope that all those people In Charge of Stuff get it right more than 50% of the time.
I sometimes impress younger people with how old I am by offhandedly mentioning that they didn't play "Stairway To Heaven" at my Senior Prom because it hadn't been recorded yet. Similarly, though this piece is centuries old it was almost unknown until I was just getting out of college.
I had a little too much today of people saying or writing things authoritatively about how things were in the old days in cultural or political matters. People didn't keep their guns in their nightstand at night when I grew up around here. Well, maybe so, but could you cite some sort of confirming evidence of that/ I like numbers myself, but I would take something like I remember it coming up in conversation more than once, sitting around in the camp after a day of hunting. Why my uncle... That's still not stunning. Maybe it was the same four uncles every time, and that is just one town and a limited number of years, but at least it's something. Everyone in this town went to church every week in those days...I remember seeing some "interesting" numbers from the early 60s when I did a church 100th anniversary history in the 80s. Church attendance was much higher, sure. But really? Only half of my neighborhoods went. I'm only counting about eight houses each time, and maybe I just happened to have a depressing effect on church attendance, even as a child...
Give me some numbers. I can take it. Damned lies and statistics gets quoted frequently, but trust me, your accuracy is much worse when you have no statistics. And statistics can be made to tell the truth. You grab them by the collar, shove them against the wall, and make them tell you who their friends are.
Lingthusiasm 59, Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking, looks at Theory of Mind from a more basic perspective, of childhood development and how TOM reflects in language. (Transcript available.) It includes the fun exercise of thinking how one would create a forwardable email to someone who already knows all the info and will distribute it under their own name. The juggling of which mind is talking to which, a task we complete fairly automatically, is interesting to contemplate.
Or not. It might be just linguists and researchers who think so.
Anyway, this is long-awaited, and quite disjointed. I eventually just gave up in order to move the blog forward.
Why is it automatic for some to ask the questions "How would I feel if someone said that to me?" or "Would this be different if it were a boss asking an employee/ a woman suggesting it to a man/ and old friend versus a new one?" while others can do it very well but need to be cued to ask the questions, and others seem unable to do it at all? WRT that middle category, is initiation sometimes an Asperger's problem? I don't think I have seen it mentioned, but I can think of some examples in people I know. As this is something that children do not tend to do but some adults do I tend to view its lack as a childishness, or a direct callousness to the needs of others. But I wince as I say it, because I know very nice people who display exemplary adulthood who find this difficult .
If we divide things into the World of Ideas, the World of Things, the World of People, we usually assign the first two categories to autists, regarding them as weaker in the third, and I can certainly think of a half-dozen examples of those who are rather avoidant of people, just off the top of my head. Yet I know some hypersocial aspies, and others that are not comfortable in the World of Ideas at all, much preferring the concrete. Is it the middle category that is the key one, then, as the stereotype used to be?
I have also noticed that some on the spectrum seem unable to resist their tendency to constantly, quietly enforce their worldview on any conversation. I hesitate to generalise, because I know non-Aspies who do that as well. Yet it is a prominent feature of a few, constantly working their political, religious, or cultural view into every conversation in a rather obsessive fashion. And these Aspies seem not to notice it, and in my limited experience from a decade ago, deny that is happening and are resentful. It's like a slow invasion by a series of hobbyhorses.
What should we be socially consequating? At what point do we stop saying that we have to be understanding and overlook things? I am asking this more from a Christian and moral POV than a practical one. Let me make up an example: A high school boy who seems quite aspie asks a girl to a dance. Yet at the end of the night she is humiliated because he has not danced with her. When friends or family try to point out to him that he has gotten this wrong and he gets embarrassed and goes and apologises, everyone is fine with the outcome. Unless the girl also has issues of some sort and was more than humiliated and an apology isn't enough to make her come around and feel all right about things. It's easy to be forgiving when there is no harm, but what if there is?
And what if he takes the opposite stance, digging in his heels and saying "But I don't like to dance. No one has the right to make me dance. I don't have to if I don't want to." Efforts to make the distinction that of course he doesn't have to dance, except in situations where he asks someone to a dance, fall on deaf ears. And we know that he doesn't have quite the ability to understand these things as others do, but he's also being unnecessarily difficult. I am not looking for a set of rules on this, but a set of questions to ask oneself.
(I originally stated this as Social responsibility, that is something that society can legitimately
consequate because it is disruptive, versus moral responsibility. How
should a Christian respond to something that looks like the former
mostly, but does not quite qualify for the latter if we make allowances
for limitations, extenuating circumstances, etc, if that helps explain.)
Related, though it doesn't look it, is the issue of Demand Avoidance. As I err on the side of candor ("Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud," above) I find it hard to fathom the idea of not explaining yourself, or at least explaining why you are not going to explain. There are hundreds of mollifying or polite statements we get used to giving to each other. "Did you mean to come across as that condescending?... Perhaps I did not express myself as well as I should have... I see your point Esmeralda, and would ordinarily agree with it, but in this instance..." Even "Sod off, it's none of your business" may sound rude, but it's way better than just not answering. Politely ignoring something is when you do it for the other person's sake, not mentioning that they are currently unemployed, or have been divorced twice, or embarrassed themselves at this event last year. But when you ignore someone for your own sake it is not politely ignoring, it is merely contemptuous, dismissing them so fully that their voice should not even be heard.
Even at that there are times when it is necessary, when violence is threatened or there is some other safety issue. But in general, the silent treatment is intentionally aggressive, no matter how much it is denied.
Yet that response is common. It has been made into comedy, by Shakespeare and Moliere, where the audience is aching to say "If she would just tell him that she is the actual princess and not the maid in disguise," or going the other way "if you would just make the accusation that he saw her kissing another man, she could explain that it was her brother..."
(Of course these days it would have to be explaining to her boyfriend that the man she was undressing in front of was her gay cousin who is a fashion designer, but same principle.)
So at first glance it looks as if it should be impossible that we think it wise to just leave so much unsaid - yet it happens so often. Many people just don't want the momentary discomfort of "a scene," and will put themselves - and more importantly put others - through unnecessary pain. Demand avoidance is just running to your room like a schoolgirl, really.
Or am I imposing my emotional preferences on others? I wonder if this activates with aspies more when it is mostly emotional material that they feel unconfident about but is absent when more concret information is being discussed.
Product reviews are important to a lot of businesses, it seems. I seldom write them. I really should, as it is the sort of wisdom of crowds that is helpful to others, even if they are sometimes faked or puffed up. I look at the overall, just to make sure there is not something weird happening. 4-point stars, fine, I don't differentiate much between 4.7 and 4.2 unless it is over a large sample. Two stars when there are more than six reviews gets my attention, but that seldom happens. I read a very few five star reviews to make sure I have perceived this hotel or lawnmower correctly, then I move to the 1- and 2-star reviews for the same purpose. Sometimes no problem for you. "Cheaply made." Yeah, it's single use and what did you expect for four bucks? Most of the terrible reviews leave you thinking that it's the reviewer who has a problem more than the product. Reading a few of those can actually be sort of fun. What did you expect, clown?
Rather like the 70s SNL episode where Bob Crawford is complaining because the National Park Service does not have any signs saying "Do Not Ride The Bears."
But sometimes these are helpful. "Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to need it for. Good to know it doesn't do that."
I can't believe I keep forgetting to tell my Hittite joke.
Old Pastor Sjostedt had learned early to start off his sermons with a little joke, just to warm up the congregation. Often it would be a Norwegian joke - those went down pretty well. But he was reading in the Scriptures one night and he saw Säg bara sådant som är gott och till hjälp för
dem som ni samtalar med, och som kan bli dem till välsignelse, which is "Say only things that are good and helpful to those you converse with, that will bless them." He was deeply troubled. Some of these things would not bless a Norski who happened to drop in. But they are so funny! It seems such a shame...ah well.
He went for months, and still found jokes to start with, but it was harder, and his preaching lacked that little punch it used to have, yah know?
He was reading the Scriptures again, this time in Genesis, about Abraham negotiating with the Hittites. Are there any Hittites left? He wondered, and a little research showed that no, there were no Hittites anymore. Long since disappeared. Ah, I have it, he said. I can tell my Norwegian jokes, but just change it to Hittites, and no one will be bothered.
So he gets up to preach the very next Sunday and says "There were these two Hittites, Ole and Sven..."
*****
I actually used this principle in Romania when speaking in a Transylvanian village. There is a form of joke using two common names from a group, such as Jacques and Pierre, and making them dumb and dumber: "J: I threw those nails back in the bin because the heads are on the wrong end...P: "You fool, those are for the other side of the house!" "J: Fire three more shots in the air to attract attention...P: I can't. I am all out of arrows." I chose to tell them about Dmitri and Radu, my interpreter assuring me that these were names often used in Romanian jokes.
It went over pretty well. Some things translate decently to other cultures.
Am I gravitating to more difficult subjects - a patently foolish idea after age 70 - or am I just less supple in my thinking? You saw the Indo-European and Hittite genetics paper and my attempt at explanation, and now I will pass this along. In my Aspie/Autism research and contemplation I am interested specifically in Theory of Mind at the moment. In looking for a unifying principle in my random notes on the subject that refuses to become a coherent essay, I thought it might be good to check up on the research of what brain areas and structures were implicated in Theory of Mind, and if there wasn't enough of that, of autism in general. I still remember that the amygdala was considered the main candidate years ago, and the anterior cingulate gyrus was thought to be an important center of comparing one narrative with another, so that if it was underperforming, it was hard to replace an old idea with a new one. That seemed like it might fit with questions like "How would you feel if someone said that to you?" or "Did you interpret the tone correctly on this one?" or "Would this sound different coming from another woman?"
Well, plenty is being done in terms of looking at what brain areas and structures are involved. Every paper leads to six other papers that has an intriguing title.
Unfortunately, you can get off to an understandble start that we now think that the amygdala is only secondarily involved, except in face perception, where it is very important. Overall brain connectivity is now considered more promising, and then you are suddenly into speculations that it's the Right temporal parietal junction, Possibly the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), or the adjacent rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), and medial posterior parietal cortices (MPPC) including posterior cingulate and precuneus. All in the same paper.
There are two additional reasons for seeing posterior cingulate as a transitional zone and subiculum*
as more the final stage of the SHS (AVI: that's the septo-hippocampal system) . First, the posterior cingulate
represents a reversal of the architectonic trend which progresses from
the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortex, via entorhinal cortex
to subiculum. On architectonic grounds the lateral septal area and
hypothalamus would be better candidates for a “next stage” of the SHS.
Second, the posterior cingulate cortex
has return projections to the pre-subiculum, some parts of the
subiculum, entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices.
Transmission within the rest of the SHS is more strictly unidirectional.
*involved,
somehow, in suppressing the incorrect alternatives to new memories.
Therefore, when it's not working, incorrect alternatives are still in
play, preventing the correct memory from being encoded and set down. Or
something. One sees that if you learned this maze of brain structures,
you could make just about any claim you liked and the number of people
who could refute you would be very small. All the people who knew the
field might agree you were talking nothing but gibberish, but that would
still be a small number.
I used to have a few brain researchers I could run into and ask questions about these things, and they were good at bringing it down to my level, or pointing out which sections were just required fill in order to not offend powers-that-be who were determined to show that this or that structure was deeply involved, despite the complete lack of evidence. So that was Very Helpful, Piglet.
Or you get sections where you are pretty sure what is being said, but have little idea how this fits into anything else, as with Harvard Medical School re theory of mind:
The investigators found that some neurons are specialized and respond
only when assessing another’s belief as false, for example. Other
neurons encode information to distinguish one person’s beliefs from
another’s. Still other neurons create a representation of a specific
item, such as a cup or food item, mentioned in the story. Some neurons
may multitask and aren’t dedicated solely to social reasoning.
“Each neuron is encoding different bits of information,” Jamali said.
“By combining the computations of all the neurons, you get a very
detailed representation of the contents of another’s beliefs and an
accurate prediction of whether they are true or false.”
I'm getting to my random fun stuff on the topic, I swear.
